This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Small French town thrust into spotlight after Paris attacks

Muslims leave the mosque after the prayer in Lucé, France. While there have been reports Paris attacker Omar Ismael Mostefai visited the mosque, its leaders say they had never seen him. (JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

By Riley SparksSpecial to the Star

Tues., Nov. 17, 2015

LUCÉ, FRANCE—Since Friday, the people who pray at a tiny mosque in a small town outside of Paris have had to answer for the alleged crimes of a man they say they barely knew.

Now, as the political tone in France shifts to the right, they’re worried everyone who shares their faith will have to answer for him, too.

Police used a finger that was found in the wreckage of the Bataclan concert hall to identify 29-year-old French citizen, Omar Ismael Mostefai, as one of three suicide bombers who opened fire on a crowd there Friday, killing 89.

Mostefai lived in nearby Chartres until at least 2012, according to Jean-Pierre Gorges, the town’s deputy mayor and a member of the National Assembly with Nicolas Sarkozy’s Les Républicains party.

About an hour’s train ride to the southwest of Paris, Chartres is a regular stop for tourists and Christian pilgrims visiting its mammoth medieval cathedral.

Article Continued Below

Gorges was the first to publicly identify Mostefai, in a Facebook post on Saturday.

Mostefai had been convicted of several small crimes and French police said they believed he had travelled to Syria from late 2013 until early 2014. French media reported on the weekend that he prayed at a mosque in Lucé, just outside Chartres.

On a residential stretch of road called Rue du Paradis, the two-storey mosque sits between single family homes and tall, grey blocks of tower housing. A burned-out car rusts in the parking lot outside one of the towers.

Just a handful of people were there to pray after sunset on Tuesday.

The mosque has been a bit less busy recently — likely because of the mass of reporters visiting since it was named in French media on Saturday, guessed Laanigri Hamid, an adviser at the mosque.

Mosque president Benali Abdallah said he knew most people who lived in the area and prayed regularly at the mosque, but couldn’t recall ever having seen Mostefai there. Hamid and Abouzid Abdelhak, the mosque’s treasurer, also said they had never seen him.

The mosque only opened in 2013, Abdallah said, and it’s not clear if Mostefai lived in the area at that point. Media reports over the weekend quoted members of the mosque who recalled seeing Mostefai at the mosque just a few times, and not since 2013, when he reportedly travelled to Syria.

Abdallah said he’s tired of being asked to condemn the attacks, and of the intense media attention.

The bombs and bullets on Friday could just as easily have found Abdelhak or his friends and family if they had been in the city on that night, he said: “Terrorists could strike anywhere, anytime.”

The imam and directors of the mosque have regularly scheduled meetings with French police to report problems or suspicious people, Abdallah said.

At the centre of the Catholic cathedral in Chartres on Tuesday, dozens of candles surrounded by yellow flowers glowed in the dim stained-glass window light.

“We shouldn’t judge Islam by those barbarians and we should not reject all Muslims for a false interpretation of religion by some,” said a priest at the cathedral, who asked that his name not be published.

The attacks were a misinterpretation of religion, he said — the result of false ideas and “brainwashing.”

“We have to pursue dialogue between Christians and Muslims,” he said. “I think it’s possible. But it will be more difficult now because we are sort of on the defensive.”

The government and political party leaders in France already seem to be pushing further to the right since the attacks on Friday.

On Sunday, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said in an interview with France 2 that he planned to close radical mosques “where people call for or preach hate,” and would speed up the deportation of imams who did the same.

Marine Le Pen, leader of the right-wing, anti-immigrant Front National party said in a statement on Friday that the country must continue the “war against Islamism.”

She also called for France to stop all migrants and refugees trying to enter the country, and suggested French citizens convicted of terrorism should be stripped of their citizenship and banished from the country. On that point, she and President François Hollande agree.

“Fundamentalist Islamism must be annihilated, the radical mosques must be closed, the radical imams expelled,” Le Pen tweeted on Nov. 14.

In his Facebook post identifying Mostefai, Gorges echoed Le Pen’s enemy-inside-the-gates message: “Yesterday’s terrorists, like those from January, spoke French fluently, without an accent.”

“They were French, at least in part, like all three in January were. The problem then is here, and everyone knows it, beyond political debates and ideological quarrels.”

At the mosque, the men were not optimistic about the next days and months.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com